Borling said the two-page ballot caused issues in precincts around the city, not problems specific to the Bernhard Center's Precinct 2. Some voters did not fill out both sides of the ballot, causing the machine to indicate that it hadn't been completed. Others would try to feed the page into the tabulator, but would run into delays because it wasn't submitted straight enough at first.

"At the Bernhard Center that was one of the areas that was experiencing delays, at the tabulator," Borling said.

Voters there were waiting up to two and a half hours to vote, despite about 2,000 people casting ballots there between Precincts 2 and 4 compared to 3,850 in 2008. Precinict 2, the busier of the precincts, had plenty of voting booths -- 20 to 25, Borling said.

At about 7:45 p.m., workers brought in a second tabulator, which cut down the line, Borling said.

Workers also ran into difficulty counting absentee ballots, Borling said. They processed 5,400 absentee ballots and had some issues with folded creases in some of the ballots. In some cases, workers had to submit those ballots two or three times, Borling said.

Emily Monacelli is a local government reporter for the Kalamazoo Gazette. Contact her at emonacel@mlive.com. Follow her on Twitter.